Efficient communication and collaboration among members of an organization is critical to the organization's success. Although the proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet have brought about a number of alternatives to the traditional face-to-face meeting, face-to-face meetings still remain the predominant manner of communicating among organization members.
Currently, a number of software applications are available for scheduling meetings among members of an organization. Many calendaring applications allow a meeting organizer to view the schedules of the intended meeting attendees in order to find time periods when all of the intended meeting attendees are free and available to attend a meeting. Even though these calendaring applications provide increased efficiency and benefits, for example, by simplifying the task of finding time periods when all of the intended meeting attendees are available to attend a meeting, the calendaring applications still require the meeting organizer to find meeting locations (e.g., conference rooms) that are available at the identified time periods.
For example, the meeting organizer first uses the calendaring application to find an available meeting time period to propose for a meeting. Having decided upon a particular time period to propose for the meeting, the meeting organizer typically accesses a separate room reservation application to determine whether any suitable conference rooms are available for the proposed time period. Not all conference rooms managed by the room reservation application may be desirable to the meeting organizer. For example, the meeting organizer may prefer to find a conference room that is in or near the building in which the organizer is located. Using the room reservation application to find a desirable conference room that is available for conducting the meeting in at the proposed time period may be a non-trivial task. For example, the meeting organizer needs to know the room numbers of the conference rooms that are desirable to the meeting organizer. If the meeting organizer does not know the room numbers, the meeting organizer has to perform a search for the room numbers of the desirable conference rooms. Having identified the room numbers of the desirable conference rooms, the meeting organizer then has to determine whether any of the corresponding conference rooms are free during the proposed time period. If none of the conference rooms are free, the meeting organizer has to return to the calendaring application to pick a new time period to propose for the meeting. Subsequent to picking the new time period, the meeting organizer again accesses the room reservation application and repeats the tedious process of finding a desirable conference room that is free during the newly proposed time period. The meeting organizer may have to repeat this process numerous times before finally finding both an appropriate time period to propose for the meeting and a desirable conference room that is available during that time period. Having found a combination of an available time period to propose for the meeting and a desirable conference room available to hold the meeting in, the meeting organizer uses the room reservation application to reserve the conference room for the proposed meeting time period, and the calendaring application to send out meeting invitations to the intended meeting attendees.